---
title: "The Doom Generation (1995) review"
description: "Y Tu Mamá También with neon, road rage, and a body count."
url: https://www.joekarlsson.com/reviews/the-doom-generation/
---

![A still from The Doom Generation (1995)](https://www.joekarlsson.com/images/reviews/the-doom-generation/backdrop.webp)

# The Doom Generation (1995)

Aug 2, 2026 | 2 min read | Rated 4 out of 5 | Dir. Gregg Araki

Y Tu Mamá También with neon, road rage, and a body count.

I watched this to prep for I Want Your Sex, my only prior Araki being Nowhere, which I remember as gorgeous and horny and gay. That’s the house style. But the “heterosexual movie” card isn’t only the marketing Araki slapped on to get funded. It’s literally accurate, and that’s the whole point. No gay sex ever actually happens here. Jordan and Xavier spend the entire runtime inches apart, gazing, orbiting, aching, and they never land it. Their looks penetrate deeper than the penis ever could, but the fluids only ever pass between man and woman. A straight world does not let these two touch, so onscreen, they don’t.

I’m bisexual, and I will take a self-destructive bi man onscreen over no bi man onscreen every single time. Jordan reads so clearly as one of us: fine with his girlfriend, undone the second X walks into frame, not opposed to being with a man so much as unsure what it would even mean. Watching him is the specific ache of recognizing yourself in someone the movie is about to punish. And punish him it does. The instant the three finally connect, Araki answers with strobe lights, neo-Nazis, and garden shears. What enrages the skinheads most isn’t that Amy’s with two men, it’s that the men are into each other. The violence is aimed with precision at the exact thing the title card swore wouldn’t happen.

When the shears come out, Amy is the one who fights back, frees herself, and saves Xavier, walking out as the blood-splattered final girl. Which quietly rewrites the whole thing. It was never the boys’ story. It was hers. And that’s the exact move Y Tu Mamá También pulls: two men use a woman as the conductor for everything they can’t say to each other, and then the film reveals Luisa was dying of cancer the whole trip and never told them. She knew. She was in control the entire time. In both films, the woman the men treat as connective tissue turns out to be the one the story actually belonged to.

So yeah, it’s horny and wild and pessimistic as hell, but what do you want from a movie called The Doom Generation. Araki built a neon apocalypse where love gets you killed and the boys never even get to finish the sentence. I saw myself in that unfinished sentence, which is either the saddest or the truest thing I can say about it. First in line for I Want Your Sex.

Also on [Letterboxd](https://letterboxd.com/joekarlsson/film/the-doom-generation/)

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I write about my homelab, AI tools, databases, and the weird stuff I build on the side.

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